


Apacalypsis

by Mems



Series: Apacalypsis [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, One Shot, Zombie AU, otayuri - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 05:03:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15722529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mems/pseuds/Mems
Summary: It’s easy sometimes to forget that they’re a part of a dying world. The walkers leave their rot, sure. The casualties are a monthly occurrence, yes. These are things that Otabek doesn’t deny, simply because he can’t.





	Apacalypsis

**Author's Note:**

> This was the piece that I wrote for the Otayuri AU Zine last year. It's been a long time coming for me to post this up here. Hope you enjoy <3

He meets Yuri in a flurry of blood and guts and swears so vulgar it’d have made his mother’s ears burn if she’d still been alive to hear them. He’s being told to get up, told to run, told he’s fucking stupid and yeah—yeah, he is, what the hell did he think he was doing, going at this alone? But all he can register is the sound of that snapping voice telling him to hurry and get the _hell up_ while he’s forcibly yanked upwards from beneath the gore of a now-dead walker. There’s a face that looks down at him, scrunched up and agitated, and _that’s_ what makes him stagnate.

Gold and green. That’s what he focuses on. Not the dead around them nor the gurgled yells of someone they leave behind as the boy who saved him pulls his stunned form off, away.

Gold and green. That’s what keeps his attention and the sharp tongue and angry words are lost as he’s lost to the realization that he hasn’t seen such bright, intense color since before the outbreak… Like a golden sun cresting over emerald Astana fields…

***

If there’s a word to describe Yuri, Otabek learns it’s _impulsive._ It’s in the way he speaks—biting, sharp, always the first thing to come to mind. It’s in the way he kills, too—eyes flashing, body twisting. Yuri strikes without hesitation and moves with a fluid grace that doesn’t belong in an undead world, but there he is. Otabek can’t deny what’s right in front of him.

Otabek learns a lot from Yuri’s impulsiveness. He learns that you can’t plan out everything. You can’t know exactly where the walkers are going to be; you can never know if they’re in their early stages or their last legs until they’re coming after you—but you can course correct and Yuri is a master at such.

It makes their weekly supply runs for the compound a success were Otabek’s attempts at solo ventures had almost cost him his life. Yuri leads, Otabek follows. He cleans up what his impulsive Yuri leaves behind because, despite the fact he’s got two years on Yuri, Yuri is just _better_ at this than he is. When he first met Yuri, he’d smirked and claimed it was _a natural talent._ The only thing natural about Yuri is his gut instincts; everything else he’s gained through trial and error, hard loss and a lot of damn work put into not dying. Otabek can’t help but be drawn to it. Yuri’s a soldier among the meek.

It’s what makes the choice to go out willingly with Yuri and hunt undead like it’s a sport that much simpler as if it’s a good idea to go about knocking in rotting skulls. The reality is that it’s not a good idea. It’s a bad idea, and Otabek knows this. But Otabek understands Yuri’s drive to fight just as much as he understands the looks of disapproval every time he leaves with Yuri. It’s far easier to hide but the longer he’s with Yuri the longer he realizes that he would much rather stand behind Yuri trying to futilely fix the world rather than cower the weary and afraid who let it rot around them.

***

One day, Otabek slips and calls him his little soldier. It’s a little too easy a thing to do, having gotten comfortable thinking about Yuri as such in his head, and it comes out of his mouth while they sit atop an abandoned rooftop somewhere in the middle of Moscow.

Otabek has long forgotten the month, but it’s sunny, and there’s no snow on the ground, so he doubts they’re anywhere near Christmastime. Groans of the dead are heard below while they share a can of baked beans that taste more like aluminum than any beans Otabek ever ate in his life, but he’s not really focused on the noxious concoction between them—rather, the red against Yuri’s cheeks as Yuri processes what he just called him. He finds himself laughing when Yuri shoves a spoonful of beans into his face while he tries to think of something to say back.

How is it that someone so furiously unshakable when facing death gets thrown off by a little nickname?

It’s Yuri’s turn to surprise when he pulls out a nickname of his own, snapped out only half-seriously through a mouthful of metallic beans and a pout that’s good enough to kiss.

“Shut up, _Beka,_ don’t know what you’re laughing about…”

***

It’s easy sometimes to forget that they’re a part of a dying world. The walkers leave their rot, sure. The casualties are a monthly occurrence, yes. These are things that Otabek doesn’t deny, simply because he can’t.

Yuri makes forgetting easy. His little soldier. His Yura. With that sharp tongue full of swears that taste so sweet when he kisses them away at night, and that golden sunset hair and green eyes that remind him of home and give him a new one. Forgetting is easy, but that’s where Otabek makes his first mistake in a long time.

He met Yuri in a flurry of blood and guts, and swears he remembers because Yuri says them so often they might as well be normal words. He hears them now, for the first time in a long time directed at him as he puts himself between Yuri and something foul and rotting that Otabek has ceased being able to define as people. It’s a reaction that comes natural to him, one he doesn’t even have to think about after all the time he’s spent with Yuri.

Yuri yells at him, but he can’t make out what he’s saying now. He doesn’t even focus on the teeth that sink hungrily into his shoulder nor the pain that follows sharply but on what he did the first time and every time after.

Green and gold, just like _home._ The last thing he sees before it all goes black.

 


End file.
